This study examines whether L1 English/L2 Spanish learners at different proficiency levels acquire a novel L2 phoneme, the Spanish palatal nasal /ɲ/. While alveolar /n/ is part of the Spanish and English inventories, /ɲ/, which consists of a tautosyllabic palatal nasal+glide element, is not. This crosslinguistic disparity presents potential difficulty for L1 English speakers due to L1 segmental and phonotactic constraints; the closest English approximation is the heterosyllabic sequence /nj/. With these crosslinguistic differences in mind, we ask: Do L1 English (...) learners of L2 Spanish produce acoustically distinct Spanish /n/ and /ɲ/ and Does the distinction of /n/ and /ɲ/ vary by proficiency? In the case that learners distinguish /n/ and /ɲ/, the second question investigates the acoustic quality of /ɲ/ to determine if learners' L2 representation patterns with that of an L1 Spanish representation or if learners rely on an L1 representation and if the acoustic quality of L2 Spanish /ɲ/ varies as a function of proficiency. Beginner and advanced L1 English/L2 Spanish speakers and a comparison group of 10 L1 Spanish/L2 English speakers completed delayed repetition tasks in which disyllabic nonce words were produced in a carrier phrase. English critical items contained an intervocalic heterosyllabic /nj/ sequence ; Spanish critical items consisted of items with either intervocalic onset /ɲ/ or /n/ ['xa.na]. We measured duration and formant contours of the following vocalic portion as acoustic indices of the /n/~/ɲ/ and /ɲ/ ~/nj/ distinctions. Results show that, while L2 Spanish learners produce an acoustically distinct /n/ ~ /ɲ/ contrast even at a low level of proficiency, the beginners produce an intermediate /ɲ/ that falls acoustically between their English /nj/ and the L1 Spanish /ɲ/ while the advanced learners' Spanish /ɲ/ and English /nj/ appear to be in the process of equivalence classification. We discuss these outcomes as they relate to the robustness of L1 phonological constraints in late L2 acquisition coupled with the role of perceptual cues, functional load, and questions of intelligibility. (shrink)

The rationality of concern for oneself has been taken for granted by the authors of western moral and political thought in a way in which the rationality of concern for others has not. While various authors have differed about the morality of self-concern, and about the extent to which such concern is rationally required, few have doubted that we have at least some special reasons to care for our selves, reasons that differ either in degree or in kind from those (...) we have to care for others. The rationality of prudence as traditionally conceived was thus taken to be threatened by Lockean accounts of personal identity. For taking a person’s identity through time to consist in psychological continuity is often thought to result in the numerical distinctness of his present and future selves, thus leaving his present self in the unsavoury position of having to ask, “Why care specially about my future self, if he won’t really be me?”. (shrink)

Political corporate social responsibility (PCSR) calls for firms to implement and engage in deliberative democracy processes and structures, addressing governance gaps where governments are unwilling or unable to do so. However, an underlying assumption that the implementation of PCSR will enrich democratic processes in society has been exposed and challenged. In this conceptual article, we explore this challenge by developing a framework to reveal the dynamics of firms’ deliberative democratic processes and structures (meso level), and those at nation state (macro (...) level). Using existing cases as illustrative examples, we demonstrate that despite the public good premise of PCSR theory toward thickening the overall democracy in a society, corporate democratization at meso level can have the opposite effect and may actually erode macro-level democratic control of society and the economy. These findings imply a need for multilevel analysis in PCSR research and greater consideration of state-level public institutions and the responsibilities of business firms toward those institutions. Furthermore, we contribute to the PCSR literature by identifying the disruptive mechanisms associated with these dynamics and outline two alternative perspectives to allow firms to continue to take on political responsibilities. (shrink)

Three main themes emerge from this edited collection. First, there has been an increased incidence of intervention for humanitarian purposes since the end of the Cold War. In these cases, the alleged conflict between sovereignty and human rights has been addressed in one of two ways: through an evolution in the notion of sovereignty, from ‘sovereignty as authority’ to ‘sovereignty as responsibility’; and through an expanded definition of what constitutes a threat to international peace and security under Chapter VII of (...) the UN Charter. Second, despite this new climate of permissiveness, humanitarian intervention remains a controversial norm in international relations – largely because of continued opposition from certain members of international society, and concerns about its potentially negative consequences. Third, while the post Cold War period has seen some successful cases of intervention to address humanitarian catastrophes, the current capability of international organizations to undertake humanitarian interventions remains limited. Indeed, as the book demonstrates, the issue of humanitarian intervention has the potential to divide international institutions such as the UN and damage their credibility. (shrink)

Health and Social Justice (Ruger 2009a) developed the ?health capability paradigm,? a conception of justice and health in domestic societies. This idea undergirds an alternative framework of social cooperation called ?shared health governance? (SHG). SHG puts forth a set of moral responsibilities, motivational aspirations, and institutional arrangements, and apportions roles for implementation in striving for health justice. This article develops further the SHG framework and explains its importance and implications for governing health domestically.

Although gender differences in attitudes toward animal research have been reported in the literature for some time, exploration into the nature of these differences has received less attention. This article examines gender differences in responses to a survey of attitudes toward the use of animals in research. The survey was completed by college students and consisted of items intended to tap different issues related to the animal research debate. Results indicated that women were more likely than men to support tenets (...) of the animal protection movement. Likewise, women were more likely than men to favor increased restrictions on animal use and were more concerned than men about the suffering of research animals. Analysis of item contents suggested that women endorsed items reflecting a general caring for animals, were more willing than men to make personal sacrifices such as giving up meat and medical benefits in an effort to protect animals, and were more likely than men to question the use of animals in research on scientific grounds. Men, on the other hand, tended to emphasize the potential benefits arising from the use of animals in research. (shrink)

Categorical perception (CP) refers to how similar things look different depending on whether they are classified as the same category. Many studies demonstrate that adult humans show CP for human emotional faces. It is widely debated whether the effect can be accounted for solely by perceptual differences (structural differences among emotional faces) or whether additional perceiver-based conceptual knowledge is required. In this review, I discuss the phenomenon of CP and key studies showing CP for emotional faces. I then discuss a (...) new model of emotion which highlights how perceptual and conceptual knowledge interact to explain how people see discrete emotions in others’ faces. In doing so, I discuss how language (emotion words included in the paradigm) contribute to CP. (shrink)

This volume argues that educational problems have their basis in an ideology of binary opposites often referred to as dualism, and that it is partly because mainstream schooling incorporates dualism that it is unable to facilitate the thinking skills, dispositions and understandings necessary for autonomy, democratic citizenship and leading a meaningful life. Bleazby proposes an approach to schooling termed social reconstruction learning, in which students engage in philosophical inquiries with members of their community in order to reconstruct real social problems, (...) arguing that this pedagogy can better facilitate independent thinking, imaginativeness, emotional intelligence, autonomy, and active citizenship. (shrink)

Most words in English are ambiguous between different interpretations; words can mean different things in different contexts. We investigate the implications of different types of semantic ambiguity for connectionist models of word recognition. We present a model in which there is competition to activate distributed semantic representations. The model performs well on the task of retrieving the different meanings of ambiguous words, and is able to simulate data reported by Rodd, Gaskell, and Marslen‐Wilson [J. Mem. Lang. 46 (2002) 245] on (...) how semantic ambiguity affects lexical decision performance. In particular, the network shows a disadvantage forwords with multiple unrelated meanings (e.g., bark) that coexists with a benefit for words with multiple related word senses (e.g., twist). The ambiguity disadvantage arises because of interference between the different meanings, while the sense benefit arises because of differences in the structure of the attractor basins formed during learning. Words with few senses develop deep, narrow attractor basins, while words with many senses develop shallow, broad basins. We conclude that the mental representations of word meanings can be modelled as stable states within a high‐dimensional semantic space, and that variations in the meanings of words shape the landscape of this space. (shrink)

While there is a growing body of work on moral issues and global governance in the fields of global justice and international relations, little work has connected principles of global health justice with those of global health governance for a theory of global health. Such a theory would enable analysis and evaluation of the current global health system and would ethically and empirically ground proposals for reforming it to more closely align with moral values. Global health governance has been framed (...) as an issue of national security, human security, human rights, and global public goods. The global health governance literature is essentially untethered to a theorized framework to illuminate or evaluate governance. This article ties global health justice and ethics to principles for governing the global health realm, developing a theoretical framework for global and domestic institutions and actors. (shrink)

This book explores Hume's concern with the destructiveness of religious factions and his efforts to develop, in his moral philosophy, a solution to factional conflict. Sympathy and the related capacity to enter into foreign points of view are crucial to the neutralization of religious zeal and the naturalization of ethics. Jennifer Herdt suggests that Hume's preoccupation with religious faction is the key which reveals the unity of his varied philosophical, aesthetic, political and historical works.

Returning to John P. Reeder's 1978 essay on “Religious Ethics as a Field and Discipline,” this essay explores debates surrounding the original intentions for the Journal of Religious Ethics (JRE) and for the field of religious ethics, as these have played out over the decades among an influential group of scholars involved with the JRE since its inception: Arthur Dyck, Ronald Green, Stanley Hauerwas, and Jeffrey Stout. While the JRE and its founding mission are in need of ongoing critique and (...) transformation, we might well still affirm the journal's ongoing importance as a site for the negotiation of a commons, the identification of possibilities for shared life, imagined beyond exclusion and domination. (shrink)

IntroductionThose in mental health-related consumer movements have made clear their demands for humane treatment and basic civil rights, an end to stigma and discrimination, and a chance to participate in their own recovery. But theorizing about the politics of recognition, 'recognition rights' and epistemic justice, suggests that they also have a stake in the broad cultural meanings associated with conceptions of mental health and illness.ResultsFirst person accounts of psychiatric diagnosis and mental health care (shown here to represent 'counter stories' to (...) the powerful 'master narrative' of biomedical psychiatry), offer indications about how experiences of mental disorder might be reframed and redefined as part of efforts to acknowledge and honor recognition rights and epistemic justice. However, the task of cultural semantics is one for the entire culture, not merely consumers. These new meanings must be negotiated. When they are not the result of negotiation, group-wrought definitions risk imposing a revision no less constraining than the mis-recognizing one it aims to replace. Contested realities make this a challenging task when it comes to cultural meanings about mental disorder. Examples from mental illness memoirs about two contested realities related to psychosis are examined here: the meaninglessness of symptoms, and the role of insight into illness. They show the magnitude of the challenge involved - for consumers, practitioners, and the general public - in the reconstruction of these new meanings and realities.ConclusionTo honor recognition rights and epistemic justice acknowledgement must be made of the heterogeneity of the effects of, and of responses to, psychiatric diagnosis and care, and the extent of the challenge of the reconstructive cultural semantics involved. (shrink)

Person‐centred practice indubitably seems to be the antithesis of technology. The ostensible polarity of technology and person‐centred practice is an easy road to travel down and in their various forms has been probably travelled for decades if not centuries. By forging ahead or enduring these dualisms, we continue to approach and recede, but never encounter the elusive and the liminal space between technology and person‐centred practice. Inspired by Haraway's work, we argue that healthcare practitioners who critically consider their cyborg ontology (...) may begin the process to initiate and complicate the liminal and sought after space between technology and person‐centred practice. In this paper, we draw upon Haraway's idea that we are all materially and ontologically cyborgs. Cyborgs, the hybridity of machine and human, are part of our social reality and embedded in our everyday existence. By considering our cyborg ontology, we suggest that person‐centred practice can be actualized in the contextualized, embodied and relational spaces of technology. It is not a question of espousing technology or person‐centred practice. Such dualisms have been historically produced and reproduced over many decades and prevented us from recognizing our own cyborg ontology. Rather, it is salient that we take notice of our own cyborg ontology and how technological, habitual ways of being may prevent (and facilitate) us to recognize the embodied and contextualized experiences of patients. A disruption and engagement with the habitual can ensure we are not governed by technology in our logics and practices of care and can move us to a conscious and critical integration of person‐centred practice in the technologized care environments. By acknowledging ourselves as cyborgs, we can recapture and preserve our humanness as caregivers, as well as thrive as we proceed in our technological way of being. (shrink)

John Cooper and Pierre Hadot suggest that contemporary philosophy can no longer be regarded as a way of life as it has become an academic discipline of study that is theoretical and abstract. According to them, for philosophy to be considered a way of life, it has to be able to shape one’s understanding of the world, guide how one should respond from moment to moment, and reach an existential level in defining one’s being. In this article, I discuss how (...) Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist philosophy is a way of life that has been overlooked by Cooper and Hadot. I show that Sartre’s existentialism presents an interconnected perspective of human existence and human development in history, is able to guide our philosophical reasoning about our everyday decisions, and offers a practical guide to living an authentic life through assuming responsibility for our life choices and engaging with our situations. (shrink)

As Japan marks the 75th anniversary of World War II in 2020, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe did not offer a fresh apology and maintained that future generations should not have to keep apologizing for past mistakes. This paper uses the unresolved war issue of the military comfort women system as a context to discuss what it means for political apologies to be more than mere political gestures founded on political interests and discusses what it takes to facilitate forgiveness. It will (...) examine the features of a repentant wrongdoer who deserves forgiveness based on how one relates to one’s past wrongdoing in order to distinguish political apologies that are genuine from those that are mere gestures aimed at hasty reconciliation. This will be discussed through the works of Jacques Derrida and Vladimir Jankélévitch. Next, through Jankélévitch’s and Paul Ricoeur’s ideas of forgiveness, it will be discussed how matters of justice and forgiveness should be understood as well as how the history of past wrongs and injustice is necessary for a genuine apology and makes forgiveness possible. It is also a moral responsibility for both perpetrators and victims to remember history in order to achieve personal forgiveness as well as begin social and political reconciliation. (shrink)

Most Sartrean scholarship attributed Sartre’s ontology of hostile intersubjectivity to Hegel’s theory of recognition, and a Sartrean politics of violence to Hegel’s master-slave dyad. This article sets out to examine Sartre and Hegel in three areas of their work: first, a reassessment of Sartre’s ontology which was commonly thought to be founded on Hegel’s thymos; second, a reconsideration of Fukuyama’s conceptualisation of democracy as the end of Hegel’s historical progress and Sartre’s critique of democracy based on a humanist version of (...) Marxism as philosophy of our time; and finally, a re-evaluation of the conceptualisation of freedom through Hegel’s universal will and Sartre’s principle of universal fraternity. (shrink)

In this paper, we will examine the role that intuitions and responses to thought experiments play in confirming or disconfirming theories of reference, using insights from both debates as our starting point. Our view is that experimental evidence of the type elicited by MMNS does play a central role in the construction of theories of reference. This, however, is not because such theory construction is accurately characterized by "the method of cases." First, experimental philosophy does not directly collect data about (...) intuitions, but rather about peoples responses to thought experiments, which may reflect their intuitions but may well not. Second, unusually in the case of the theory of reference, experimental prompts involve elicitation of the phenomenon under investigation—that is, referring—and it is the reference facts rather than the intuitions that a theory of reference should capture. Finally, "best fit" models like the method of cases are inconsistent with the actual practice of semantic theorists, who appeal to general principles of theory construction as well as considerations native to the theory of reference, often in the service of rejecting intuitions. Indeed, Kripke himself viewed several claims of his theory as unintuitive, but felt no pressure to alter them on that account. These facts, we'll argue, suggest that the relevance of experimental methods in the theory of reference cannot be straightforwardly extended to other fields: an experimental prompt containing Newtons two rocks tied together in empty space may elicit referring, and may also elicit intuitions, but it doesn't also elicit the phenomenon under investigation. Furthermore, the considerations native to the theory of reference are not part of physics, which has its own distinct set of principles and considerations. This suggests that an evaluation of the centrality of intuitions/ responses to thought experiments in philosophical methodology must proceed in a piecemeal fashion. We conclude that the potential contributions of experimental philosophy will take different forms in different sub-fields of philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

In the closing years of the eighteenth century, a great intellectual and moral challenge to European empire was launched by many of the most innovative thinkers of the day, including Kant, Adam Smith, Bentham, Burke, Diderot, and Condorcet. They drew on a strikingly wide range of ideas to argue against empire: among others, the rights of man and the imperative of popular self‐determination, the economic wisdom of free trade and foolishness of conquest, the corruption of natural man by a degenerate (...) civilization, the hypocrisy required for self‐governing republics to rule despotically over powerless subjects, and the impossibility of sustaining freedom at home while practicing despotism abroad. (shrink)

While there are now an increasing number of studies that critically and rigorously engage with Big Data discourses and practices, these analyses often focus on social media and other forms of online data typically generated about users. This introduction discusses how environmental Big Data is emerging as a parallel area of investigation within studies of Big Data. New practices, technologies, actors and issues are concretising that are distinct and specific to the operations of environmental data. Situating these developments in relation (...) to the seven contributions to this special collection, the introduction outlines significant characteristics of environmental data practices, data materialisations and data contestations. In these contributions, it becomes evident that processes for validating, distributing and acting on environmental data become key sites of materialisation and contestation, where new engagements with environmental politics and citizenship are worked through and realised. (shrink)

We can assent to a proposition, build a theory around it, base our actions on it, and affirm its truth—without ever taking it to heart. This frequently happens, for example, to recipients of bad news who figure out what is entailed by the news, make appropriate plans, and pass the news on to others—all without really "taking it in." It happens to those who accept a scientific claim without abandoning their more private views of how things work, and it happens (...) to members of a jury who confidently arrive at a verdict of "guilty" yet remain, on some deeper level, unconvinced. Conversely, people may dismiss their prejudices as mere prejudices while continuing to hold onto them, and a friend may acknowledge a remark to be innocuous yet be offended. Such phenomena are widespread, diverse, and philosophically intriguing. They are not simply cases of weak versus strong belief, or belief that something has a low probability versus a high probability ; nor are they cases of accepting on authority what we only partially understand. Rather, in each case, there is certain lack of depth to one's beliefs. (shrink)

Context plays a crucial role in our propositional attitude reporting practices. A belief-reporting sentence which seems true in one context may seem false in another, as Kripke showed us in ‘A Puzzle About Belief.’ To put it a bit sloppily, may seem true when we are discussing Peter's beliefs regarding Paderewski-the-pianist and false when we are discussing his beliefs regarding Paderewski-the-statesman. Peter believes that Paderewski is a fine musician.A number of recent theorists have taken this contextual variation very seriously, and (...) attempted to provide accounts which accommodate it in one way or another. Salmon and Soames accommodate the variation in pragmatics, arguing that our intuitions about attitude reporting often result from mistaking pragmatic implicatures for semantic content. Other theorists have offered semantic accounts which yield contextually varying truth conditions for belief reporting sentences. I have a great deal of sympathy for the project: I think the contextually varying intuitions do exist, and that they need to be accommodated, in one way or another. I am not so sure, however, that this can be done. (shrink)

If it's not good for something, then it's good for nothing. The Director of the Centre for Business and Professional Ethics at the University of Leeds continues her examination of basic terms frequently used in business ethics.

Against a backdrop of non-ideal political and legal conditions, this article examines the health capability paradigm and how its principles can help determine what aspects of health care might legitimately constitute positive health care rights—and if indeed human rights are even the best approach to equitable health care provision. This article addresses the long American preoccupation with negative rights rather than positive rights in health care. Positive health care rights are an exception to the overall moral range and general thrust (...) of U.S. legal doctrine. Some positive rights to health care have arisen from U.S. Constitutional Eighth Amendment cases and federal and state laws like Medicare, Medicaid, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Finally, this article discusses some of the difficulties inherent in implementing a positive right to health care in the U.S. (shrink)

This book offers an intelligent and thought-provoking analysis of the genealogy of Western capitalist 'development'. Jennifer Beard departs from the common position that development and underdevelopment are conceptual outcomes of the Imperialist Era and positions the genealogy of development within early Christian writings in which the western theological concepts of sin, salvation, and redemption are expounded. In doing so, she links the early Christian writings of theologians such as Augustine and , Anselm and Abelard to the processes of modern (...) identity formation of which the West, the First World, the Rule of Law and the individual subject and his or her freedoms are but a part. The concept of development is thus identified within western culture as a symptom of loss within the desire for completion; as the logic behind the economic restructuring of nations as underdeveloped is revealed as that ruthless imaginary by which First World nations maintain their ideal of themselves. Drawing upon anthropology, economics, historiography, philosophy of science, theology, feminism, cultural studies and development studies, this book contains the best of interdisciplinary work in international law. (shrink)

Economists often consult multiple models in order to combat model uncertainty in the face of misspecification. By examining modeling practices at the Bank of England, this paper identifies an important, but underappreciated modeling procedure. Sometimes an idealized model is manipulated to reproduce the results from another distinct auxiliary model, ones which it could not produce on its own. However, this procedure does not involve making the original model “more realistic,” insofar as this means adding in additional causal factors. This suggests (...) that there are ways to make models more representationally adequate that do not involve de-idealization in the straightforward sense. (shrink)

Much due criticism has been directed at Levinas's images of the feminine and “the Woman” in Time and the Other and Totality and Infinity, but less attention has been paid to the metaphor of maternity and the maternal body that Levinas employs in Otherwise Than Being. This metaphor should be of interest, however, because here we find an instance in which Levinas uses a female image without in any way seeming to exclude women from full ethical selfhood.In the first three (...) sections of this paper I explain how maternity functions in Otherwise Than Being. I argue that maternity is used as an image of the vulnerability or passive sensibility that characterizes the relation with the Other, as well as a metaphor for Levinas's account of ethical responsibility as substitution. In the final section of the paper, I defend the claim that Levinas's maternal metaphors are not disparaging to real, empirical women. I also discuss a remaining worry that feminists may have about the metaphor: namely, that it characterizes pregnancy and motherhood in ways that challenge some pro-choice assumptions. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a new reading of Simone de Beauvoir’s first major work, L’Invitée ( She Came to Stay ), in order to reveal the text as a vital place of origin for feminist phenomenological philosophy. My reading of L’Invitée departs from most scholarly interpretations of the text in three notable respects: (1) it is inclusive of the “two unpublished chapters” that were excised from the original manuscript at the publisher’s request, (2) it takes seriously Beauvoir’s claim that (...) phenomenological philosophy is often better expressed in novels than essays or treatises, and (3) it views the novel’s main characters, Françoise and Xavière, as one woman who has multiple, contradictory, excessive selves. Thus approached, L’Invitée provides us with a thick description of one woman’s embodied consciousness and thereby shows us with specificity what a consciousness whose underlying structures reflect sexual difference looks like. This consciousness not only experiences itself as being both gendered, categorized, disciplined, and defined and in excess of these genders, categories, disciplines, and definitions at the same time, but also experiences its own self-relation through the presence of multiple selves who are each simultaneously attracted to and negating of the other. As such, the defining features of this consciousness involve experiences that I have respectively labeled “ontological multiplicity” and “auto-jealousy.”. (shrink)

Government-sponsored school lunch programs have garnered attention from activists and policymakers for their potential to promote public health, sustainable diets, and food sovereignty. However, across country contexts, these programs often fall far short of their transformative potential. It is vital, then, to identify policies and organizing strategies that enable school lunch programs to be redesigned at the national scale. In this article, we use document analysis of historical newspapers and government data to examine the motivating factors and underlying conditions that (...) allowed South Korea’s universal free, eco-friendly school lunch program to become a tool for advancing social justice and ecological goals at the national scale. We analyze the socio-historical evolution and current status of the Korean school lunch program, combining the multi-level perspective with insights from environmental sociology and critical food studies, in order to shed light on the factors that enabled the program to become an innovative niche and articulate the opportunities and challenges it now faces. We identify the state-sponsored creation of what we call “precautionary infrastructure” as a key anchoring mechanism between the school food niche and agri-food regime. Precautionary infrastructure includes new supply chains, certification standards, and sourcing policies that provide a stable market for eco-friendly farms and small-scale producers, while minimizing the environmental health risks of school lunch by delivering organic and pesticide-free ingredients to on-site kitchens that serve free lunches to all students. This analysis offers insight into how public school-lunch programs can become protected niches that help drive sustainability transitions within agri-food systems. (shrink)

In this article, we examine how white working-class women reimagine gender in the face of social and economic changes that have undermined their ability to perform normative femininity. As blue-collar jobs have disappeared, scholars have posited that white working-class men and women have become increasingly isolated, disconnected from institutions, and hopeless about the future, leading to a culture of despair. Although past literature has examined how working-class white men cope with the inability to perform masculinity through wage-earning and family authority, (...) gender has been undertheorized in these discussions, treating working-class women’s and men’s despair interchangeably. Drawing on 37 in-depth interviews conducted in a former coal-mining town in northeastern Pennsylvania, we identify three overarching strategies that women deploy in their life histories to cope with disruption: embracing pain as an opportunity for self-growth; dispelling shame and striving for equality; and enduring suffering. These strategies allow women to feel hopeful and worthy as they confront enormous challenges, whether starting over following relationship dissolution, learning to be independent from men, or simply surviving hardship for the sake of their children. We explore the implications for recreating gender identity in each strategy and question how different strategies might serve to protect women from, or alternatively solidify, sentiments of despair. (shrink)

This article provides empirical evidence of the social context and moral reasoning embedded within a parents’ decision to participate in autism genetics research. Based on in-depth interviews of parents who donated their family’s blood and medical information to an autism genetic database, three narratives of participation are analyzed, including the altruistic parent, the obligated parent, and the diagnostic parent. Although parents in this study were not generally concerned with bioethical principles such as autonomy and the issues of informed consent and/or (...) privacy and confidentiality of genetic information, a critical analysis reveals contextual bioethics embedded within these different narratives. These include the negotiations of responsibility that parents confront in biomedical research, the misguided hope and expectations parents place in genomic science, and the structural barriers of obtaining an autism diagnosis and educational services. Based on these findings, this article demonstrates the limits of a principle-based approach to bioethics and the emergent forms of biological citizenship that takes into account the social situations of people’s lives and the moral reasoning they negotiate when participating in autism genetic research. (shrink)

Distance education has a long and complex history. It accounts for more than one-third of all higher education students in the world and, because of its very nature, has produced some of the top graduates worldwide who were unable to study fulltime and on-campus for various reasons. One of the most prestigious graduates of the DE system was the former state president of South Africa, the late Nelson Mandela. Online learning is a form of DE and fast becoming the preferred (...) method of instruction and delivery. Critiques of online learning, and of DE itself, will argue that, because of the separation of the teacher and the student, only academic skills can be taught and learnt using this medium. The so-called ‘softer skills’ – those that focus on the development of the person – are best taught in a face-to-face, traditional environment. This article focuses on a review of DE theories and models. A particular emphasis is placed on online learning theories, and how the teaching of formational learning skills can be successfully incorporated into this educational setting. The article draws from a range of studies that have been conducted, based on conceptual and empirical research evidence from various authors. Drawing from Garrison, Anderson and Archer’s Community of Inquiry framework for online education, it presents key elements that relate to the formational training of theology students. The article examines research that both supports and cautions against online learning for formative development. It concludes by suggesting a blended model of both face-to-face and online learning, where meaningful interactions between the learner and teacher take place, is desirable. The article highlights the important role that DE can play in developing the human component of education. (shrink)